Our detective hero battles a criminal who calls himself "the Mastermind", while he looses one girlfriend and gains another while balancing family drama. Cooperation among police agencies is mythical--everyone plays nice. Alex has had sooo many girlfriends that one wonders what will happen to this one? The ending is a masterful twist. ( )

I have enjoyed a few books with the character Detective Alex Cross. I haven’t followed this series from book one, like another one of his series I have followed, but each time I read one of these books out of order I have been satisfied with the stories. Once I had read about the character, Alex Cross that’s all I needed to alternate within the series. This book was highly entertaining that I could have read it in one setting. I t was a great story. The suspense never let up, the action was constantly there and as the reader, I was held in the psychological grip of, “what could possibly happen next”. The characters were well developed and on their toes to enlighten the events page after page.

Alex Cross from the start of the story never got a chance to think twice. He was chasing a mastermind killer and dealing with his personal life drama through mystified twist and turns throughout the story that the prediction who the mastermind was kept the reader hanging on with a “who is it” until the surprising end. The story is about a string of robberies and killings around the Washington area. However, the mastermind selects others to do his dirty work and once they have filled his assignments the masterminds kills them and selects new crime thrillers to do each robbery leaving no one behind. To make the cases more twisted the mastermind sexually assaults the dead females whom he has killed and has left distorted and mutilated.

While Alex helps to find this creep, he has a crisis at home with his family, a burden he didn’t need at that moment. Alex is under pressure with a huge weight on his shoulders and the case is getting tougher and that is what the mastermind wants. As the mastermind plans his last scenario, he wants it done with perfection. Alex finally cracks down on the case hard and thinks he has a suspect, could it be the “Mastermind”? No, it won’t be that easy, Alex goes back to the drawing board. The mastermind has really made this a tough case. The story keeps going and going until the reader comes to the crashing end…This is one of the better stories in this series that I have read.( )

4 stars. The women in his life don't seem to be very lucky... And, it seems unreal that he doesn't ever really get/stop the bad guy. They just keep piling up in his past(free to roam). I hope the series changes a bit where someone actually gets captured and goes to jail and stays there. Geeze. ( )

4 stars. The women in his life don't seem to be very lucky... And, it seems unreal that he doesn't ever really get/stop the bad guy. They just keep piling up in his past(free to roam). I hope the series changes a bit where someone actually gets captured and goes to jail and stays there. Geeze. ( )

Wikipedia in English (2)

In this heart-pounding new thriller, Detective Alex Cross pursues the most brilliant killer he's ever confronted, a mysterious criminal who calls himself the Mastermind. In a series of crimes that has stunned Washington, D.C., bank robbers have been killing bank employees and their families if the robbers' instructions are not followed to the letter. Alex Cross knows this is no ordinary criminal - the pathological need for control and perfection is too great. Cross is in the midst of a crisis at home - but the case becomes all-consuming as he learns that the Mastermind is plotting one huge, last, perfect crime ...

Roses Are Red, James Patterson's sixth Alex Cross thriller, opens with the District of Columbia detective attempting to mend his nearly unraveled family. The year-long kidnapping of one's intended (1999's Pop Goes the Weasel) will do that to a relationship. Christine, the kidnappee, is amenable with one reasonable condition: that her family's horizon remain uncluttered by homicidal maniacs. How unfortunate, then, that the joyous christening of their newborn son is rudely interrupted by the FBI bearing news of several heinous murders requiring the attention of detective (and doctor of psychology) Cross.

"Three-year-old boy, the father, a nanny," Kyle said one more time before he left the party. He was about to go through the door in the sun porch when he turned to me and said, "You're the right person for this. They murdered a family, Alex."

As soon as Kyle was gone, I went looking for Christine. My heart sank. She had taken Alex and left without saying good-bye, without a single word.

Which leaves Cross free to hunt the Mastermind, the barbarous brains behind a widening series of bank robberies in which employees or their family members are held hostage and, when instructions aren't followed to the finest iota, slaughtered. Given the cases' glaring and unfathomable inhumanity, Cross's long- time DCPD partner (the wonderful giant, John Sampson) gives way to the warm, attractive, and fiercely intelligent FBI Agent Betsey Cavalierre.

The longer and harder Cross and Cavalierre remain on his trail, the bolder and more brutal--and shiveringly close to home--the Mastermind's strikes become. And, thanks mostly to lightning-short paragraphs and a point of view that rappels from the first-person Cross to the third-person Mastermind, the tale progresses at hot-trot speed to a bona fide doozy of a denouement. It'll be over before you know it, so sit back, hold your breath, and enjoy the show. And stay tuned for the next one. --Michael Hudson

Facing a particularly vicious killer in his latest investigation, Alex Cross finds his family targeted by the vengeful Mastermind, a situation complicated by tension in his relationship with his girlfriend and his daughter's unexplained seizures.